Thursday!  Because that means 6 more hours of work until a blissful week off   And – I got almost 7 hours of sleep last night. I’m high on being almost well rested today!

DecemBear looks by the coatrack

Today was fun.  In the sense that it is …  Thursday!  Got out of work on time, only to be foiled by construction on the on ramp from work to get home – it took about 40  minutes to get on the beltway.  *sigh*  But not to worry – the evil traffic forces did not put a damper on….  Thursday!  Got home and attempted to clean.  Which also did not damper….  Thursday!  Took Pinot for a walk around the lakes.  Watched the season 8 finale of the biggest loser on Hulu while doing weights.  (I’m a bit behind, ok?)  Got in a run before my ….  Thursday! … daydreams were fullfilled and I bit into the yummy, yummy mushroom veggie burger at Redwood (which I’ve been daydreaming about since the last time we went).  Loved meeting up with Colby & Josey for dinner tonight, it was a great way to end….  Thursday!  I ran to Giant before heading home, and then proceeded to fall asleep cuddled with Nick on the couch – which was late enough to be the perfect kick off to FRIDAY!

Oh – and a late addition – today was exciting because they finally released the course map for New Orleans!  The elevation is still forthcoming, but I’m counting on something flat…  slightly bummed that the 1/2 and the full don’t cover exactly the same 13 mile path to begin with.  Oh well.

New Orleans Course Map 2010

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Over the last few weeks I haven’t been able to shake certain images from my head. I’m day-dreaming of trees…tall, skinny, white birches and dark, mysterious redwoods. I’m day-dreaming of nests–birds’ nest..thin and wiry branches tightly woven. I’m day-dreaming of robin’s egg blue…blue that looks pristine and regal with all of the white that I’m day-dreaming of too. White, cream, clear crystal. I wonder why?

dreammoods.com

Birch
To see a birch tree in your dream, indicates self-punishment or guilt issues.

Redwood
To see redwood trees in your dream, symbolize longevity and continuity. Due to their color, the redwoods also represent passion, life, and blood.

Nest
To see a bird’s nest in your dream, signifies comfort, safety, homeliness, protection, or new opportunities. Consider the condition of the nest and how it parallels your waking home situation and home life. Alternatively, it also means emotional dependency.

To see a nest full of eggs, symbolizes your financial future and financial security. The dream could thus be a pun on “nest egg”.

Blue
Blue represents truth, wisdom, heaven, eternity, devotion, tranquility, loyalty and openness. Perhaps you are expressing a desire to get away. The presence of this color in your dream, may symbolize your spiritual guide and your optimism of the future. You have clarity of mind.

Depending on the context of your dream, the color blue may also be a metaphor of “being blue” and feeling sad.

White
White represents purity, perfection, peace, innocence, dignity, cleanliness, awareness, and new beginnings. You may be experiencing a reawakening or have a fresh outlook on life. However, in Eastern cultures, white is associated with death and mourning.

Crystal
To see a crystal in your dream, signifies wholeness, purity, healing. development and unity. It represents your higher Self. The dream may be a metaphor for something in your life that is crystallizing or taking shape.

To dream that you are looking into a crystal, represents how you are looking within yourself to find your true destiny. Alternatively, it indicates your outlook of the future.

Wow. So I totally didn’t look at this before I began this post–just cut and pasted as I went along. How EERILY accurate is this?

Oh. I also wanted to share this with you. I haven’t really sat down and sketched in a long time, but I’ve been pulled toward this tree and nest thing…so I did a quick little sketch. I don’t even share my art with my husband, so feel priveleged

*Ok. I’m lame; I grew up in the computer age and cannot figure out how to do this. Can someone please tell me how to more effectively share pictures of art on the blog? Thanks!

Copyright 2009 ~ Mario Vaden

A large and very old redwood tree with unusually shaped growth next to the trunk.

The tree in the photo is a very old coast redwood near the Grove of Titans. Can you see growth alongside the left side of the trunk? It does have a sprouted stem on top of it, and its not apparent if some part of it was a dangling branch at one point in time. But its laying to tight against the main trunk to be just a branch. In some ways it looks like a growth sometimes referred to as a lignotuber, more so than a burl.

In Jedediah Smith Redwoods, and other redwood parks, the redwood trees occassionally make this kind of growth, which almost seems like flowing tissue, as if it were wooden lava. Flowing so slowly that its undetectable to the human eye. Similar to how icicles form over weeks or months,

Whatever you want to call this, and however long it takes, it does not flow, and there is nothing liquid about the state of the wood tissue. It’s all a matter of cell division and growth, but sort of unusual compared to many we see along the trail.

Likewise, glass is not a liquid, but is solid. Glass is generally classed as an amorphous solid rather than a liquid, having all mechanical properties of a solid.

In historic buildings, the antique glass which is centuries old, was made by glass blowers who spun glass, causing the edges to be slightly thicker. It did not flow thicker at the bottom of the panes over time, it was made that way. The thicker edges were intentionally put at the bottom of the frame to reduce water or condensation accumulation around the lead. And a few pieces have been found where the thicker edge is up, and the thinner edge down: likely an oversight or carelessness back in that day.

In the redwoods, if you have not seen this kind of unusual growth before, slow down a bit when you hike and look at a few more redwoods. Glance deeper into the forest and see what you can find.

Coast Redwoods

This is a talk given by Richard Preston at the TED conference a year ago.  It is an amazing look at coast redwoods and the ecosystems that have evolved within their canopies.  The pictures and content are fantastic.  I would highly recommend Preston’s book about the giants trees called The Wild Trees.  It is a super interesting read and one that really got the ball rolling in my new found love and appreciation of trees.  I actually started reading it while at Gold Bluffs beach campground in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California and was able to stare at redwood trees while I read.  Tough life.  Any ways, I think the movie is a good starting point, but would for sure read The Wild Trees.  There is also a bit on the end regarding the loss of Eastern Hemlock trees, which was news to me.  I will have to look into this further.  If I find anything of interest I’ll be sure to post it.  Cheers.

Boy Scout Tree Trail in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park

This is one of the best trails in the north redwood parks between Avenue of the Giants and the Smith River. Jedediah Smith redwoods is between Hiouchi on Highway 199 and Crescent City on Highway 101. To reach the trailhead, you need to use the old Howland Hill Road through the midst of the park.

There is a small waterfall near the end of the trail, called Fern Falls. The Boyscout Tree, after which the trail is named, is about 80% of the way to the end. Its not marked. But at some point in the hike, you should notice a worn path going up a hillside to the right. That’s the path to take. The tree is only a couple of hundred feet or so off the main trail.

One of my favorite areas along the trail, is a huge fern glade, part of which is in the photograph seen here. A wide open vista of western sword ferns, and redwood tree trunks.

For specifics, visit this site and find Jedediah Smith redwoods:

redwoodhikes.com

Michael Taylor the Tree Discovery Man: Image Copyright 2008 by Mario Vaden

This is Michael Taylor who discovered many of the largest known coast redwoods along the west coast of the United States, in California.

There should be a page with more information about him at Wikipedia:

Wikipedia: Michael Taylor

He is seen here getting a rough preliminary measurement for a coast redwood or Douglas fir, in the vicinity of Lost Man Creek: Redwood National Park.

Michael Taylor is one of the main characters in a book by Richard Preston, called The Wild Trees. In Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast by Robert Van Pelt, Michael is also seen in one photo for size comparson. And a brief appearance in a National Georgraphic video about the discovery of Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world, discovered by himself and Chris Atkins, in 2006. I am looking forward to Michael launching his own website one of these days.

For more about Redwoods, see:

Largest and Tallest Coast Redwood Trees

Yes, now that I have finally passsed through the ritual genocide of turkeys in celebration of the kindness of the Native American people before their genocide (I wish there were holidays that were this un-PC in England, but no, all we get is fucking Boxing Day and the occasional May Day riot), I’m for all intents a purposes fully assimilated into American culture! Green card next.

Thanksgiving Day was amazing, I spent it at my friend Kevin’s grandma’s house (cute tiny old Asian lady) with my friends Kevin and Carol and we went to the beach first which was supercool and I took some really cool photos for the first time in ages. The dinner was a hybrid Taiwanese/American thing with turkey and cranberry sauce and pot stickers (that’s what Americans call dumplings apparently) and we played Supertramp and Talking Heads on the vinyl player while we were eating. So I was very happy.

As for the rest of the week, it involved some really fun times with movies and people in my dorm who didn’t go home and my friend Shu Yi a lot (she’s sooooo funny, especially her really terrible Telenovela impression), for example last night we stayed up until 5.30 talking about stuff. There were some less cool times, and by less cool I mean boring/lonely/generally shit, when everyone else was working and I was getting all homesick and missing everyone who wasn’t here, although I’ve been using it pretty well by getting more into Radiohead and Justice. But they’re all crawling back now, yes that’s right, they just couldn’t stay away.

The October issue of the National Geographic magazine screamed out at me from the shelves of the newsagent in Carnarvon several weeks ago. The distinctive yellow-bordered front cover and header were virtually obscured by the girth of a redwood overlaid with the title ‘The tallest trees redwoods’.

Redwoods have interested me since childhood, when I’d try to climb any tree that would bear my weight. The idea of such mighty targets must have appealed, even though they were the other side of the world. So I bought a copy of the NG and marvelled at the beautiful photography and long essay on the current status of the ‘super trees.’

Endemic to the Californian coastline, redwoods aren’t just the tallest growing tree species on the planet, they’re an incredibly complex aerial ecosystem, providing habitation to all manner of other plants, birds and, apparently, crusty biologists that virtually live under their canopies. It’s no surprise that they’re an immense source of American pride.

In this modern world the best is measured by its size. It’s the biggest, the tallest, the widest, the heaviest. Whatever. And everything has to be done fast. … Well, apparently there was a time when size wasn’t everything, and neither was speed. As we were travelling along the convict-built Old Vasse Highway through Warren National Park we came across a signpost marked ‘The Marianne North Tree.’

Marianne North was an English painter who travelled the world and left her collection to Kew Gardens when she died. On Charles Darwin’s advice she came to Australia in 1880 and made her way through the area of the west of Australia called the Southern Forests. When her cart broke she was stranded for several hours at the side of the road and filled her time drawing the incredible trees nearby – she called them “shining white pillars” in her diary. I like to think her description was a subtle dig at other travellers of her generation (and financial means) who took the ‘Grand Tour’ around the European antiquities but didn’t necessarily seek out the natural beauties of the so-called new world.

So here we were on her 130-year-old trail, except in a working Land Rover rather than a broken cart, looking at the same immense Karri tree with the distinctive burl that Marianne painted. Judging by her painting she was here at a similar time of year to us. The Latin name for Karri is eucalyptus diversicolor. It recognises the way the trunk changes colour throughout the year as it grows and then sheds it bark; yet to our eyes the tree looked today the same as it did to Marianne North, so many cycles of shining whites and soft reds ago.

Karri Gums near the Warren River, West Australia (Marianne North)

130 years on ... The same tree - plus Ella and THE BENCH

I don’t suppose it would have really bothered Ms North to know that Karri is the third tallest tree species in the world. It didn’t really bother us, either; they’re impressive enough to look at without knowing that they grow up to 90 metres (295 feet) tall and live to 350 years of age. However, Marianne could only have appreciated the mighty trees from their feet. It is easy to stand, nostrils pointed to the sky, and look all the way up to their lofty heights because Karri grow arrow straight and have few branches below the crown. In the 1930s, however, the region’s foresters selected some of the tallest Karri and built lookouts in the heavens to act as firetowers. Nowadays aeroplanes are used for firespotting, but the blessed Department for Conservation and Land Management – or CALM  (an unusually good acronym) – have maintained three of them for the public.

How could a couple like us (Ella was a childhood tree-climbing addict too), resist!

Looking straight up a Karri

Ella coming down a firetower tree

Almost unbelievably, when there is risk of fire and the weather is too bad for flying, the lookouts are still used. It’s enough to hover 60 metres above the ground on a fine day, but imagine swaying a metre and a half from side-to-side in a thunderstorm up there! There’s a saying that in the Karri forests it rains for nine months of the year … and the rain drips off the leaves for the other three! It hasn’t quite been that bad during our visit, and we’ve been fortunate to have some brilliant campsites – first by the river in Warren National Park, and then in a hut (complete with pot-bellied stove) in Shannon National Park.

The Karri Forests aren’t just full of Karri trees, and they’re only one of the big trees – the others being Marri and Jarrah. There are countless other species of trees, plants and animals that make up the mosaic. But the predominance of eucalypts makes it feel much like the eastern states’ forests. It’s strange to think that we’re separated from them by such a daunting stretch of desert, and that we’ll be going through it at some point. But that’s not for a while. There’s more walking to do first – we’re going to spend a week on Bibbulmun Track.

Reflections at Warren National Park

According to KPIX (CBS 5) in San Francisco, the Banana Republic stores in San Francisco are hiring foreigners at minimum wage and putting them up in hotels because they claim they can’t find qualified local workers.  So, KPIX had their staffers try to apply for jobs.  “Oh, we’re not hiring” they said.  When contacted, the Gap/Banana Republic operation said that the store was “mistaken” and that they really are hiring.

Donald Fisher, the now deceased founder of the Gap, was a lying sack of shit and always had been throughout his life.  His purchase of virgin redwoods which he claimed he would preserve (only to be logged when nobody was looking) was just one in a string of lies he laid during his life. 

So, now the legacy of Donald Fisher continues at the Gap and Banana Republic.

How about some honesty in business for a change.  Is that so hard?

Lucky few who got to attend the awards

I was lucky enough to attend the Periodicals Training Council (PTC) New Journalist Awards (alongside the four above) that took place at the Vinopolis in London on Friday November 20, 2009. The award ceremony included a morning master-class with some of the journalism’s world elite, who gave us their personal tip’s to succeed as a journalist.

The tips ranged from journalist to journalist, with some of the tips more useful than others, i thought it was only fair to share these tips.

Sara Cremer, Editorial Director of Redwood lead the master-class, introducing the key speakers. Working as Editorial Director of Redwood, Cremer has been working in the industry for 16 years, and admits, “she has never been bored in her job.” This is something i definitely look forward to.

Julian Linley, Creative director at Bauer Media and previous editor to Heat Magazine was our first speaker, and was interesting to say the least. Offering tips such as,

• Reach the stars – don’t be intimidated, have a fearlessness about yourself
• Always remember you reader – introduce people to new insights and ideas, but remember how to focus your ideas for the reader.
• Don’t take NO for an answer – be persistent, it’s what pay off.
• Contacts are your life-line - Keep agents of celebrities close,but remember it’s not a friendship
• Trust your instinct – If you think it is good, more often than not the reader will agree.
• Learn from your boss – never sit in silence, always ask questions.
• The paranoid survive – Paranoid that if you don’t get that story, someone else will.
• HAVE A LIFE – Try and leave the office at a reasonable time everyday, it keeps you sane.

Steve Barrett, editor of Media Week, Haymarket Business Media tips were along the same lines as Julian Linley, with the exception of,

• Work efficiently towards deadlines.
• Online journalism is a great skill to have – journalism is changing
• Don’t be an email journalist – get out and meet people.
• Never stop learning

Steve seemed extremely enthusiastic about his work saying, “if you have the right skills you can use them to get ahead.” Although a question concerning the recent downfall of their print publication proved a little too invasive. Before answering the question Barret said “I don’t see how that has anything to do with today.” But in a room full of budding journalists, isn’t it our job to get answers to killer questions, no matter how invasive they may seem?

Mark Jones, Editorial Director of Cedar Communications was by far my favourite speaker, Jones enjoyed his work, even though he named his tips “The Devils guide to Journalism” he spoke very passionately and was very motivated. Making his presentation fun and comical. His tips were somewhat different, take a look,

• It’s good to share – they say never give free advice, buts its good to help each other.
• When faced with a fact and a joke, choose the joke – there needs to be more entertaining copy in the world.
• Decide if you’re a man or a woman – choose your writing skills, do you write for men or women, don’t go in-between, you may get lost.
• Steal, Filch and imitate – obviously not plagiarism, but understand how the magazine that you like writes.
• Write like an Iranian taxi driver drives – Writers are good when they are a little bit reckless.
• Insult the Welsh and if that fails… – its safe prejudice, apparently
• Shoot a Baboon – take AA Gill for example, his failures are more interesting than his successes.
• Be a pest – get in peoples faces, get known.
• Write a letter from paradise – this gives you a path way to that place by writing down what you want.

Andy Cowles, IPC Media Creative Director was our final speaker and was unfortunately cut short due to time restrictions, this was devastating as Andy gave us more of an insight into how to produce magazines that sell, showing us the methodology into how they are put together. It did relate slightly to propaganda and persuasion, making reference to how to ‘word’ a certain headlines so that you attract your reader, but then again the media is propaganda and persuasion. His tips were,

• Identify the brand –  It will sell the issue.
• Media has to be flexible – magazines are always the same but they are also different.
• Continue to draw people in – make people feel as though they did a good thing by buying your magazine.
• Control colour – Colour is an opinion, it has a point of view.
• Own a news event – create something out of nothing, look at people magazine, biggest selling magazine in the world.
• Opinion over fact – check the difference
• Art direct – opportunity to take a great picture, have an opportunity to sell the brand, if you can’t create it, buy it!
• Illustrate – play around, put a picture over a background.
• Write a memorable line.
• Create some promises – that gives something to the readers.

Andy Cowles quoted Mike Soutar founder and chief executive of Shortlist.com, and this quote was an example of how magazines sell, and what journalists need to remember when writing stories, think how they may look on the cover.

“We are viewers before we are readers.”

Cardiff University student Magazine won New Student Magazine of the year in 2008

Last Sunday, we had a wonderfully warm and sunny November day, and headed down to Fern Canyon. This is around 40 miles into California, 125 miles south of us. The turn off of highway 101, Davidson road, is about 3 miles north of Orick CA. It starts out with an elk viewing area, and yes, there were lots of elk within 100 feet of the road, inlcuding a big bull with huge antlers. From here on, it’s a narrow gravel road, that has sharp corners, and winds between the small redwoods, in spots, quite narrow. It is not a road for motor homes or trailers! Quite a few family cars were at the trailhead, although most people were in SUVs. Halfway, after crossing a hill, you come down along the small, grass covered dunes and the ocean. Following this north, the road is at the base of a cliff for a mile or two, and fords two shallow streams, no bridge, but good gravel and 4″-6″ of water.

At the trailhead, there’s restrooms, picnic tables, and interpretive signs. The trail is quite short, to the start of Fern Canyon, about 1/10th mile. Figure on wading in the stream, crossing the very slippery logs didn’t work for me! The stream is shallow. The canyon is amazing, the walls are nearly vertical and absolutely carpeted with ferns.

To make things even better, I could indulge in my obsesion of photographing more mushrooms!

I was a bit surprised when I saw the moosehead.  Okay… a lot surprised.  The statue of the head, as big as canon and hard to miss, was perched on a ledge to the right of the main dining room.  Straight ahead was a statue of a deer, and to the left of that… a couple of bears catching trout.  Several thick brown posts resembled tree trunks with fake green leaves attached to the sides.  All of this back woodsy-decor complimented the wall paper of a forest at sunset… or was that sunrise?

For a moment I wondered if I had stumbled into the wrong place.  This was not something you’d expect to find in downtown L.A., but there it was at Clifton’s Cafeteria.  The casual restaurant at Broadway and 7th proudly displays its California Redwood theme.

The place was huge with two sets of stairs leading to the second level.  Behind the main staircase, I could hear the clang of pans and serving utensils.  There was also the undeniable smell of comfort food… macaroni and cheese, corn bread stuffing and mashed potatoes with gravy.   I grabbed a tray and moved from the salad station to the entrees… fried tilapia, roast turkey, stuffed bell peppers and steak smothered in a ranchero sauce.

This downtown Clifton’s has been around since the 1935… the second one to open, and the only one still in business.  The cafeteria is known for good food at reasonable prices.  In fact, management promises to feed the homeless for free.   While there, I did notice a few homeless men enjoying the food and temporary shelter.  There was also a diverse mix of other diners, including a couple of trannies.

As I sat at a picnic-style table on the upper floor, listening to the trickling of a waterfall… I came to the sad realization that my tilapia was just okay… not bad, but not great.  I had a feeling if I had chosen another entrée, like the steak in the ranchero sauce, I might have had an entirely different eating experience.  I did enjoy the carrot salad and the pecan pie, though.  So if I  ever happen to be in the neighborhood again, I might just stop in and check out the day’s menu.

On my way out, I noticed a sign on the door.  The cafeteria would be closed for filming the next day.  In fact, the film crew was already unloading a truck outside.  I asked one of the crew members what they would be shooting.  “That TV show, Parks and Recreation,” he said barely looking up.  “Wow, Parks and Recreation,” I said, impressed.  “I love that show!”

As I walked down the street to my car, I thought about the landscape I had left behind, and how Clifton’s was the perfect fit for a television show with the perfect premise for venturing into the woods.

According to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, “Some 90 to 95% of old growth [redwood] forest has been felled since, and the remainder is now almost entirely in parks and reserves.” More at NPR.

Image: Michael Nichols/National Geographic

On the Net:

1. Coast redwoods information and photos
2. Coast redwoods for sale
3. Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) bonsai trees for sale
4. Giant sequoias outside their natural range
5. Help preserve redwoods: Sempervirens Fund

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

By Nick Osborne and Ged Carroll

The Internet has been changing every facet of modern life, even the mother of parliaments (at least to a certain extent anyway).  An exact state of affairs at parliament would be tricky to gauge, as innovation seems to be happening in different places.

Examples include the recent guide to Twitter, published by Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which outlined how the micro-blogging service could be used to share policy information and engage the general public around issues of interest.

The main political parties have shown enthusiasm in adopting social media as well, although this hasn’t necessarily translated across to their respective Parliamentary Members where there is the more familiar range of adoption patterns from early adopters to laggards to complete technophobes. Pretty much every Member of Parliament and election candidate not contesting a safe seat has a web presence of some sort, whether that is through a party backed website, or through extensive social media branding.  Most of these are run through constituency or Westminster offices however, there are few MPs who are leading the way in the digital space.

Amongst the social media front-runners are:

• Tom Watson. The Labour Party MP for West Bromwich East is known for being the first blogging MP and lists the digital world and social media as being keen personal interests
• Kerry McCarthy has been made Labour’s Twitter Tsar, managing social media engagement in the lead up to the next General Election, as well as being an active tweeter and blogger
• Jo Swinson. The Lib Dem MP for East Dunbartonshire has 1.901 followers on twitter and may have been the first MP to tweet from the House of Commons Chamber and was definetly the first MP to mention Twitter in a Parliamentary Debate
• Tom Harris. Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, was recent voted the best MP, Scottish and Left-of-Centre blog by readers of Total Politics
• John Redwood MP. The Conservative MP for Wokingham was recently voted the second best MP blog by Total Politics readers, losing his number one position last year to the aforementioned Tom Harris

Apart from the lack of uptake of social media tools across the Parliament as a whole, the biggest area where there seems to be a lack of understanding about social media is that it is a conversation. Although Twitter lends itself nicely to sound bites there doesn’t seem to be that much political engagement going on. There also doesn’t seem to be that much awareness about the impact of what they can be talking about. For instance, one MP recently complained about the workload required to deal with constituents.  In another case, an automatic news feed on Peter Hain’s Facebook page prominently displayed an embarrassing piece of coverage.

Despite the high profile digital campaign of Barack Obama, the US generally isn’t anywhere near the level of near universal digital and social media adoption that one would expect. For example only 29.5 per cent of US Congress members and Senators are on Twitter – 123 House members and 35 Senators out of a possible total of 535. .

But the fact is, the next election is going to be a hard fought campaign and this is likely to have a transformative effect on digital politics as a new generation of politicians come through.

So where is the opportunity in digital for parliamentary and public affairs campaigns?

The most obvious use of social media is for campaigning as it is easy to demonstrate support for a cause, through re-tweets or number of members in a Facebook group.  Social media both facilitates and reveals groundswells of popular support. Nixon’s famous silent majority, are no longer silent or invisible to politicians.

For electoral candidates, Obama’s secret was always to tweet asks and Calls-to-Action and this should be harnessed by MPs or PPCs. There is no particular need for an MP to tweet about what they are having for breakfast, although the ‘inane’ tweets do personalise the tweeter so they can be beneficial.

But the key is, actively engage and converse with users online by asking supporters, party members and voters to do something. Come to my rally, get one friend to help deliver leaflets, donate £5 to the party, come knock on doors with me. Tweets like these that actively call for support and include the public are far more likely to help the candidate get elected.

This method of personalised engagement and Calls-to-Action can also be harnessed for out and out public affairs campaigns. It isn’t something that will transfer well to asking for support for a bank’s or defence company’s campaign, because the public will always be wary of sinister motives. But it will transfer brilliantly to campaigns surrounding NGOs, charities, patient groups, green and sustainability projects, local engagement and welfare organisations due to the need to rally support through calls-to-action.

A second and underrated factor is providing content for researchers. Like the rest of the UK, parliamentary researchers will often hit Google as their first point of call when finding out about a new subject and developing a point-of-view for their MP. Providing the freshest, most relevant content around a particular area, particularly if it has an industry rather than a specific corporate slant is one of the best ways to influence from a digital point-of-view.

There has been an increasing level of political social media analysis in the recent months. Tweetminister essentially aggregates tweets by Members of Parliament, as well as blogs on interesting issues surrounding communication and an open Parliament while the Hansard Society has recently published a report into the use of Facebook by MPs.

We would love to hear your views on the matter, so please feel free to leave comments.

Cross posted with Ruder Finn Dot Comms.

Today could have been your average, run of the mill Wednesday – but no – today is day 100!  AND today is my half birthday.  So yeah, if that doesn’t make your average run of the mill Wednesday more exciting, I don’t know what will.

How did we celebrate this fantastic day you ask?  Well – my day consisted of a very exciting tip that I learned from Colby & Liz over the weekend – leave my high heeled shoes at work.  Much more comfortable than walking to/from work in them.  Genius!  And they fit in my lower desk drawer so nicely (nope, haven’t gotten quite to the shoe rack point just yet, mainly from a lack of desire to go to Target.)  The CSA pickup today was actually pretty cool -  I had never before seen celery not from a grocery store celery – and it is huge.  AND the CSA today gave us some free apple cider with our box of goodies.  Good stuff.

While I went home, went for a run, and did a bit of weights, Nick went to Laura’s Marathon Happy Hour downtown.  The Gburg boondocks comes though again, there was no possible way for me to get the CSA, get home, and make it back downtown for happy hour.  I’m glad Nick got to go, and woohoo to Laura for an awesome time in the NY marathon last weekend!

Nick and I met up with Maria & Jeremy for dinner at Redwood in Bethesda this evening.  Good times, we don’t get together very often these days.  NJ and I really enjoyed the food, though I hear there is some debate on the quality in the foodie community.  I’d recommend it and gladly go back.

In every place I’ve ever been outside of my country of birth I’ve heard one assertion about Americans espoused with enough frequency that it’s become something of a refrain to my ears.  “Americans,” I have been assured by people in more than half a dozen different countries “like big things.”  It seems that everyone acknowledges this as a universally accepted truth.  People are happy to grant that there are individual exceptions to this trend, but rest comfortably on a confidence that in the minds and eyes of the majority of people from the United States size provides some index of the inherent worth of any given thing.

I don’t think those that think this way are entirely wrong.  In American eyes bigger frequently is better.  The United States is a big place.  It’s not as large as many Americans seem to think it is, but it is a great deal more massive than many Europeans seem to realise.  For example, the straight-line, crow-flying distance from L.A. to New York is just over 2445 miles while that between London and Baghdad is slightly in excess of 2542 miles.  Yes, that latter pair of cities is further apart but only by a margin of around 100 miles.  People expect the UK and Iraqi capitals to be world’s apart socially and culturally as well as geographically.  The same doesn’t hold true for expectations of the two American cities.  They are, after all, in the same country.

Even though I grew up in the States I am struck by how large so many things are when I am there.  Cars are huge,  roads are massive.  Meals and waistlines are expansive.  Everything seems huge and its something people take pride in.  I know from my conversations with other American expatriates that they too notice the sheer size of so many things during their trips back home.  More frequently that I like to think about I also hear my fellow countrymen and women who are in England as tourists or exchange students  asserting what they see as the clear superiority of some American counterpart to an English place or product simply by braying about  its larger size.  My British friends have also teased me about this near worship of bigness by so many Americans.  Why, they want to know, do so many Americans see and assert a large size as a nearly universally praiseworthy trait in its own right?

Why indeed? In my musings on the subject I’ve come up with two factors that I suspect contribute to the equation of largeness with goodness.  The first lies in many parts of the natural landscape of the United States.  Speaking generally the sheer size of the landmass of the country means it contains a huge diversity of landscapes that in and of itself is pretty impressive.  Then there are more specific features.  When I was 13 years old I spent a week at the Grand Canyon.  Never once did my sense of wonder at what I was looking at leave me.  It’s immensity played a key part in my heightened sense of awe and it’s an aspect of the place I’ve never seen captured adequately in a photo or on film apart from an IMAX documentary I once watched.  Even that only captured part of the place’s grandeur through size.

If places like the Grand Canyon or the Sequoia and Redwood trees of the Pacific Coast achieve a majesty, drama and value in part through their size it is easy to see how and why some, perhaps many, European settlers and their descendants extrapolated a more universal relationship between size and value.  I don’t think that’s the whole story though.  Instead, to have any hope of really understanding the enduring American obsession with size we have to consider European ideas and concerns about the continent in the first few centuries after it’s European colonisation and the founding of the United States.

One of the most important lessons my doctoral research into the ideals and ideas that eventually coalesced into what’s now so carelessly referred to as the American Dream taught me was that, in many ways, America was defined in the minds of Europe before the Europeans arrived and after their arrival.  Some of those definitions were hopeful in the extreme and viewed the ‘new’ continent as a kind of new Eden for the regeneration of mankind.  Others were less sanguine.  Anxieties about degenerative and vitality-sapping influences were not uncommon, nor were they quickly silenced.

This was a hot topic of debate and in the late 18th century; it even prompted the Abbe Raynal to organise an essay

The Abbe Raynal

contest seeking answers to the question “Was the discovery of American useful or harmful to mankind?”  I don’t think it’s hard to work out how most American citizens and thinkers would have responded to such a question.  After all, wasn’t the United States founded precisely as a much needed alternative to the corrupt old practices of Europe and as a shining example to the rest of the world?

Whatever the true or complete answers to that last question may be it was the case that during its period as a series of colonies and in the aftermath of its  independence the United States wanted to make a good impression on Europe.  The newly created American citizens were in many cases eager to prove that their country and society was, if not superior, then certainly not inferior to the Old World from which it was born.

The anxiety on the part of the nation and its people to prove their worth took a number of forms examined and commented on by far better writers and thinkers than I.  Some of them still reverberate today.  For example many Americans can be touchy on the subject of what some consider to be the high arts or products of high culture in their home towns, states and nation.  Many of the same Americans, when visiting Europe, cram a huge amount rapacious museum viewing into short spaces of time with the main goal, as far as I can work out, of ticking off the largest number of items from a check-list of great works of art held in European collections.  At some level I suspect that part of the impetus for both these behaviours is a worry over being seen as less cultured, less experienced and less educated than the urbane and beautiful denizens of the Old World.

Immediately after Columbus stumbled into the Americas, continuing through their colonisation and extending beyond the establishment of an independent United States, one of the the most discussed theories about the United States centred on the concept of degeneration.  To make a rather long story short degeneration theory viewed the United States as a malign influence on its human inhabitants as well as its flaura and fauna.  Those who accepted the theory thoughtthat the offspring of European settlers in the New World would be diminished in comparison to their parents and  inferior to their European-born peers.  Not surprisingly the racist assumption of the inferiority of the indigenous peoples of North American was used as proof of the the continent’s degenerative influence.

This is where the whole question of size enters the frame.  European thinkers who accepted the existence of some eroding degenerative power at work in North America confidently asserted that American specimens of humans, plants and animals would in their inferiority to their European counterparts be smaller than those analogues.  As it turned out, however, the portion of the continent that would become the United States was a big place with some big things in it.  In their anxiety to refute conclusively European assertions of superiority finding examples of big things was an easy and attractive way for American thinkers to brush degeneration theory and its assumptions aside.  Even Thomas Jefferson spent some time collecting large specimens of American plants and animals to send to European proponents of degeneration.

What all this amounts to is that, at some level, it was European thinking in the form of degeneration that first suggested to many American minds that big is necessarily better.  Americans were disproving the assumptions and assertions of Old World superiority using some of the terms by which that world defined itself as superior.  In the fear of being seen as a retrograde step in the development of history and society Americans of European descent latched on to the idea of size as a marker of inherent value which could and should be loudly proclaimed and displayed.  This combined with some of the truly stunning and huge natural features of the landscape those same people and their descendants settled to allow the preoccupation with size to take strong root in the collective psyche of the United States.

Yes, many of the people with the United States do have something of an obsession with size for its own sake.  In fact I don’t think any of us who grew up there are entirely immune to it.  That being said, I do think that when Americans praise something for its large size on its own or in comparison to a non-American counterpart they are expressing the seeds of an anxiety sown long ago.  At some level people from the United States don’t cite size because they truly think it demonstrates American superiority.  Instead they do so because they are afraid of being the inferior residents of a degenerative provincial backwater sneered at by some of the people they most wish to impress.

That’s my theory anyway. . .

I know it’s been an extremely long time since my last post. I’ve been busy. I’ve been working hard and we were trying to finish our deck before the rains. To add to the misery, my hard drive failed, so I was preoccupied getting everything in working order as well as getting all my pictures for this project and others to post.

Long story short, beginning of this summer, we decided to build a deck behind our house. You see, beforehand, we had a fake lawn. It was not a lawn, not a meadow. It was a patchy mess of weeds that needed constant weed wacking and wasn’t really pleasant anyway. We knew we didn’t want a water sucking lawn. After much debate about whether to build a patio or a deck, I won and in the end, we are both happy.

We ended up with a floating design using Dek-blocks, which seemed easier and cheaper.

We have been enjoying the deck now for quite a few weeks, although we officially finished it all just last week (well, we still need to stain it, but that’s not part of construction, right?)

This whole thing took us a lot of weekends since June. Planning was of course a big part of it. I don’t think we actually broke ground till August. While we really like the end product and decided we’d doing again knowing what it takes, it was still a way bigger project than we anticipated.

I’ll try to ramble about some details as I find time. Feel free to ask any questions.

I think we will take a break from projects for quite a while. You might call it a burn-out. Are there any projects that gave you the burn-out? Did you think it was worth it?

After all the hype, last night’s Question Time proved to be rather underwhelming.

The panel of Jack Straw (Labour Justice Secretary), Baroness Warsi (Tory shadow communities minister), Chris Huhne (Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman), Bonnie Greer (playwright and critic) and Nick Griffin (BNP leader and MEP) immediately split into the factions of Griffin versus the rest and went rapidly downhill from then on.

It soon resembled nothing more than ‘An Audience with Nick Griffin’ and concentrated almost exclusively on the BNP policies regarding race and immigration.

Straw seemed to doze off at times and he reminded me of the incontinent old gimmer who sits in the corner at parties and wakes up every so often to moan about the music being too loud before shitting himself and nodding off again.

Huhne was blandness personified – nothing he said really registered with me.

Baroness Warsi performed reasonably well and gave Griffin a few tough moments but never really got going and when she did, Dimbleby reined her in and moved on to the next question rather abruptly.

Bonnie Greer came out with some amusing stuff but seemed more concerned with making herself look clever than with making Griffin look a fool. Even then her historical banter with Griffin showed that neither of them had much grasp of history.

In short, the panel lacked intellect and gravitas.

The debate never widened and we never got a chance to hear how Griffin’s party would sort out the economy, improve policing and the justice system or tackle Afghanistan.

So, how would I have handled this edition of QT?

The panel would have been stronger: Redwood or Hague for the Tories, Cruddas or Field for Labour, Ming Campbell for the LibDems and Shami Chakrabarti as the non-politico (although that’s open to debate!)

The questions would have been far more wide-ranging so that the emotionally-charged  matters of race and immigration were far less dominant and the audience should have been less partisan.

That way, there would have been more of a level playing field but Griffin would have had to prove himself as an ‘all rounder’, which so far he seems not to be.

As it was, Griffin emerged as a one issue politician who was fortunate to have only been asked questions on his ’specialist subject’. I doubt whether his performance boosted his popularity to any significant extent and he had one or two sticky moments when he looked like a blustering idiot, but he could have emerged from the programme far worse than he did.

In short, a wasted opportunity and the only winners were really the BBC, who managed to attract 8.2 million viewers.

I’ve always had an interest in the weather, but then, don’t we all? Except, I’ve always been interested in how it works, what it does and why it does it, as well as figuring out how to tell what it might do next. Weather forecasting is.. well ask Michael Fish!

So, a little  over a year ago I installed a weather station. This is made up of a base station which sits on my desk and via large display tells me what the weather is doing now and what it has done historically, it also attempts to provide a basic forecast. It does this by taking measurements from a weather station outside, this has sensors for

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind Speed
• Rain Fall

The weather station is a WS2350, it is sold under a few different brands and is generally around the £110.00 mark. This price point is pretty much the entry level for a station that can be linked to a computer. In the 14 months its been working Ive not had any problems with it.

At first I used the wireless feature to link the sensors to the base, the obvious benefit being no drilling holes into the house for wires. However, there are two downsides to this. First it means the sensors have to be battery powered, not a big problem really, a decent set of batteries ran for 6 months. The second issue is more important, when connected wirelessly the sensors only take wind readings every 120 seconds or so, when connected with a wire its 8 seconds. This I found proved a bit of a limitation so quite recently my office wall acquired a hole and now base and sensors talk over the wire.

Being a tech junkie this couldn’t possibly be enough though, could it? No, of course not, we need to grab all that data and publish it online.  At first I used the software that came with the weather station I bought, this proved to be very limiting and unreliable. Searching the interweb revealed various other software systems. First I tried WUHU which is the software from Weather Underground, this allowed me to grab the data and publish it to different web sites. I still publish to www.wunderground.com and also publish a web cam image looking out over the garden.

The Weather Underground web site is very good and the features and maps are fantastic, but its not ‘my’ web site. Further trawling through the interweb revealed Cumulus from SandaySoft. This is a piece of donationware, free but if you find it useful you are asked by Steve, the author, to make a donation to fund further development. I’ve dealt with Steve via the forums he provides for help and support and both he and the Cumulus software are first class. In my opinion if you are going to set up a weather station, you use Cumulus.

So, my weather website. Well its currently more or less the default site generated by the excellent Cumulus software. Its ‘live’ most days but I tend not to run the PC that uploads the site and data all night. The site updates every minute and there is a weather feed via twitter @RedwoodWeather